Printing services Web sites allowing a user to access the site from the user's home or work and design custom products for personal or commercial use are well known and widely used by many consumers, professionals, and businesses. For example, through the site VistaPrint.com, VistaPrint Limited markets a variety of printed products, such as business cards, postcards, brochures, holiday cards, letterhead, announcements, invitations and the like. Typically, printing services sites allow the user to select a customizable design template prepared by the services provider and use online tools provided by the site to incorporate the user's personal information and content into the template to create a custom product design. When the design is completed to the user's satisfaction, the user can place an order through the site for production and delivery of a desired quantity of the corresponding printed product. When an order is placed, the user's electronic document design and related printing parameters, such as indicators of the quantity to be produced, the type of paper stock to be used, and the required delivery date to the user, are stored electronically in a database of pending print jobs for use by the printing services provider in scheduling and producing the printed product.
For a printing services provider engaged in printing large numbers of relatively short run individual orders for personalized products, it is advantageous to assemble many of the individual print jobs into a larger aggregate print job or “gang” having similar print requirements, e.g., paper stock, quantity to be produced, required post-printing processing, and whether the product is to be printed in color on both sides or only one. The ganging of many individual print jobs into a single aggregate print job file allows many individual products to be printed simultaneously on relatively large sheets of paper or other material using large format printing presses. After printing, the printed sheets are cut to separate the various individual printed products for subsequent packaging and shipment to the individual customers. U.S. Pat. No. 6,650,433 entitled “Managing Print Jobs”, the entire disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference, discloses a system for the creation and printing of aggregate print job files comprised of a number of individual print jobs
In the past, the gangs to be printed during a given production period were typically all created well in advance of the time of actual printing. For example, once per day, usually at some point during the preceding night, the service provider would execute a ganging program to search a database of pending print jobs and generate the gangs to be produced during the next business day or possibly later.
The creation of production gangs well before the time of actual production has several drawbacks. For example, the circumstances existing at the time of gang creation may have significantly changed before the gang can be produced. For example, one or more documents in a gang may have been modified or cancelled after gang creation. In this situation, to avoid disrupting the production schedule of all of the other documents in the gang, the printing services provider will typically choose to proceed with the printing of the gang and then discard those modified or cancelled documents, resulting in wasted materials and a lost opportunity to print another document in that gang position. Also, after the gangs are generated, there may be an unexpected equipment malfunction or unexpected staffing issues, such as illness or inclement weather that unexpectedly prevented some production personnel from being at work. Further, because a printing services Web site is constantly available to its customers, new product production requests are being received from customers 24 hours a day. High priority or rush printing requests may be received by the site shortly after the daily gang creation process was completed, resulting in a day's delay before the associated print job can be incorporated into a gang at the next scheduled gang creation time. As yet another drawback, if a product in a gang becomes damaged during processing or for another reason requires reprinting, a day's delay will typically be encountered before that product is incorporated into another gang. The delaying of production of a product by even one day may cause the printing services provider to incur increased shipping charges by requiring the provider to employ a more expensive expedited shipping means to get the product to the customer by the promised delivery date. In some cases, the delay may result in the product not reaching the customer by the delivery date, leading to customer dissatisfaction, refunds and, potentially, the loss of future business.
The above described drawbacks in the prior art are not limited to the printing of gangs of documents, but apply also to any type of manufacturing or processing involving the automated ganging or aggregation of multiple individual electronic job files for convenience or efficiency of production, such as multiple individual job files ganged together for etching, embossing, engraving, or other types of processing.
There is, therefore, a need for automated systems and methods that both (a) provide advance gang scheduling to advise production facility personnel of the type of production tasks and materials required during one or more upcoming work shifts and (b) provide increased flexibility to handle and adapt to high priority orders and unexpected problems by delaying the final creation of production gangs until shortly before the production process